“From his youth when he contemplated suicide, Alec suffered from bouts of depression that were exacerbated by his success. In 1956, his search for a religious or philosophical system that would counteract them ended with his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church.”
— Alec Guinness by Piers Paul Read
And then continued with the same trajectory, eventually playing the wise old man with enough financial cunning to leave a fortune to his hers, which must have included a number of Catholic charities. It’s a great story.
“‘Irritated by George Lucas saying he hadn’t made up his mind whether to kill off my part or not,’ Alec wrote in his Small Diary on 12 April [1976]. ‘A bit late for such decisions. And Harrison Ford referring to me as Mother Superior didn’t help.'”
He turned down their initial offer; they came back with $150,000 plus two percent of the producer’s profit. When the film came out to good reviews, Lucas actually offered Guinness an additional quarter percent. A remarkable gesture.
Ford is going to be in Expendables 3. That’s what you need to know about Ford.
With Gibson!
What I like about the Expendables series is that it’s so … expendable. And they must have factored that in from the beginning. Just to laugh that much harder on the way to the bank.
Yeah, like it’s all made on the fly, but it doesn’t matter.
It should have mattered. They just didn’t bother thinking up goofy lines like the 80’s flicks they’re referencing. The films are just too serious, gritty, and loud. The few jokes fell flat. I’d settle for an element of nonsense in the absence of any good writing.
I’m guessing you’re not going to want to see my True Grit re-reboot, True Gritty, starring Mel Gibson as Brewster Hogburn.
I have also continued a trajectory seemingly set in motion long before my conversion, albeit one of abysmal failure. No fortune and, thank God, no heirs to leave nothing to.
What about your old buddy, Jon Webb?
Thanks Matthew, cool pic.
I’m happy to leave him my collection of orange safety vests. So no, not quite nothing.
Ah, we can dance if we want to, we should just make sure we’re dressed
With some goggles on and a jockstrap on and an orange safety vest…
I am the REK in Korrektiv.
New novel giving you trouble?
Indeed. The meta in Bird’s Nest will look like Flatland when I’m through with it. If.
For whom is the funhouse fun?
For lovers, the funhouse is fun.
For phonies, the funhouse is love.
But for whom, the proles grouse,
Is the funhouse a house?
Who lives there, when push comes to shove?
Do you really have to ask?
Brief interviews with hideous men.
I resemble that remark.
Brief interviews with hideous men with curious hair.
Although of course you end up becoming yourself.
Even more like you than you are yourself.
Just to bring things ’round to the start a bit.
Das ist komisch.
And they know from funny.
Just to bring things ’round to the middle a bit.
Holy crap: “What Kafka’s stories have…is, finally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.”
Your absence in New Orleans looms ever larger, sir…
A supposedly fun biennial conference I’d hate to miss again.
***
Here are some of the first Wallace-annotated volumes I’d request when visiting UT Austin’s David Foster Wallace Archive on an imagined research trip:
– The Moviegoer
– The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
– The Library of America’s Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor
I note that the Wallace Archive also includes the following books that Wallace owned but did not annotate, but that would still likely reward a look:
– The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day, inscribed and annotated by Mark Costello, Wallace’s roommate at Amherst and, later, in Boston, who (according to Wallace biographer D.T. Max) was seriously considering the Catholic priesthood when he and Wallace met
–Stories of Faith, by John Shea, published by The Thomas More Press (presumably a Catholicish press), and inscribed by ‘Mr. Ed Costello’ (presumably a relative of Wallace’s roommate)
***
I’ll need the following items to complete my research paper:
1) JSTOR access;
2) room and board within walking distance of the University of Texas campus for a period of no less than fourteen (14) days;
3) approximately three (3) industrious indentured grad students;
4) two hundred thousand United States dollars (US $200,000) in small, nonconsecutive bills; and
5) one (1) suitcase, the contents of which I may specify in some less public forum.
If interested, DM me.
You can have the JSTOR. As for room and board, you get a pup tent and a two-week supply of ramen and microwave bean burritos; you can pitch the tent behind the library. You get one chain-smoking undergrad English major. Let’s see what you turn up before we start talking about money. And my five-year old is all done with her Little Mermaid backpack; you can have that. Get to it.
–Matthew Lickona, ‘Comment 49076’, Korrektiv (August 2014).
–D.T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York, Viking Penguin, 2011), Nook edition, chap. 4.
I’m the C.
JOB
You, Potter, and Webb are the KOR.
I certainly like Guinness. And I like Lucas a little more after reading that story.
To really bring this around, I should add that Piers Paul Read’s “Alive” has a place in my own conversion story (and if memory serves, in Mr Potter’s as well). I remember reading the story of the Andes survivors on a church retreat (at Pilgrim Firs, out on the Olympic peninsula) and being grounded to our cabin for taking one of the canoes out, without the necessary permission or even an orange safety vest (hence the current collection). The grounding was fine by me, affording as it did the opportunity to bury myself in the book about the plane crash, the avalanche, and the starvation conditions that led to the cannibalism by which they were able to survive. It’s an amazing story, and one of the things that really stuck with me was the guilt the survivors felt after eating the flesh of their close friends. After the survivors returned, they were consoled by a priest who insisted that their actions were not sinful, and moreover offered Christ’s gift of His real presence as a model for what had been required on the mountain. I was maybe ten or eleven years old at the time, but it had me thinking. Was there any difference between whatever the priest said and what the ministers were saying there at Pilgrim Firs? Maybe there was.
Thank you for that.
To think that at least one thread, maybe more, ran from the Last Supper, to Calvary, to the horror of the Andes plane crash, to Read’s book, to young Finnegan’s church-retreat time-out, to the waters of baptism, to this here blog comment.
A REK on the road to Damascus.